Government officials insisted this did not amount to “a top-down reorganisation” in the mould of former Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley’s changes, which were so extensive that the NHS’s then-CEO quipped they could be seen from space.

In his Sunday Telegraph article, Mr Streeting suggested more was to come, saying new NHS England chair Penny Dash had “identified hundreds of bodies cluttering the patient safety and regulatory landscape, leaving patients and staff alike lost in a labyrinth of paperwork and frustration”.

By contrast, Wes Streeting’s action represents a revival of an older Labour tradition, shadowing the politics of the Health Minister, ‘Nye’ Bevan, who drove the foundation of the NHS in the 1940s. If a “bedpan” fell in his birthplace, Tredegar in South Wales, the sound would “reverberate around Whitehall”.